Aurora was first published in Mexico City in 1994 by Ediciones Equilibrista, and was the author's third full-length collection. Composed of five extended sequences, Aurora contemplates the pacts we make with ourselves, others, and nature in order to survive. The poems explore what happens when those bonds of trust and dependence are weakened or broken by infidelity, death, and time. In her writing, Lopez-Colome combines a highly associative lyrical sensibility with an insistence on philosophical exactness. Pura Lopez-Colome was born in Mexico City in 1952, but also spent part of her childhood and youth in Merida, Yucatan, and attended high school in the USA. She studied literature at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, publishing literary criticism, poems, and translations in a regular column for the newspaper Unomasuno. The author of several important books, including Aurora and Intemperie, as well as a Collected Poems titles Musica inaudita (Eds. Verdehalago, 2004), she is also the translator into Spanish of works by Samuel Beckett, H.D., Seamus Heaney, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Robert Hass, Robert Creeley and others.

Amongst the most ambitious and varied work of Pura Lopez Colome's distinguished career, Speaking in Song displays the poet's extraordinary range and musicality, conducting philosophical interrogations of the natural world-and one's story, history, and place in it-in the context of hearing and memory, and in the form of song. Many of the poems have been set to music by composers from Mexico, the United States, and the United Kingdom. "Pura Lopez Colome's poems have an incandescent inwardness, of the kind that Marina Tsvetaeva said she found in the poems of Rilke. Whether she is speaking of the guava or the avocado, or the sea otter, or the movements of the soul, or the `unread places' of the earth, her poems always feel to me like manuals on how to be fully alive. She is in that way a resource and a gift, and in this book, Dan Bellm's English has caught her fire and her music almost exactly." -Robert Hass

In her most recent book, Watchword--the winner of the Villaurrutia, Mexico's most esteemed literary prize--acclaimed poet Pura Lopez Colome writes of life at its brink with fierce honesty and an unblinking eye. This work shares the darkness, intensity, and skeptical hope of Thomas Hardy's great poems. Like them, Lopez Colome's poems have flashes of secular mysticism, sparked from language itself, which generate unforgettable passages and give voice to a world familiar and odd, wounded and buoyant. In the energy and intensity of her work and in her exhilarating words, we discover both a line of conduct and the source for a richer life. This bilingual edition features the poems en face in Spanish and English.